15

A user must provide permission to enable geolocation, or notifications, or camera access, so why not also require permission for megabytes of JavaScript that will block the main thread?

Without limits, there is no incentive for a JavaScript developer to keep their codebase small and dependencies minimal. It’s easy to add another framework, and that framework adds another framework, and the next thing you know you’re loading tens of megabytes of data just to display a couple hundred kilobytes of content.

I’m serious about this. It’s is an excellent proposal for WebKit, similar to the never-slow mode proposed by Alex for Chromium.

Rush hour. The worst time of day to travel. For many it’s not possible to travel at any other time of day because they need to get to work by 9am.

This is exactly what a lot of web code looks like today: everything runs on a single thread, the main thread, and the traffic is bad. In fact, it’s even more extreme than that: there’s one lane all from the city center to the outskirts, and quite literally everyone is on the road, even if they don’t need to be at the office by 9am.

How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.

Here’s a heartwarming tale. It starts out as a description of processing.js project for Code Club (which is already a great story) and then morphs into a description of how anyone can contribute to make a codebase better …resulting in a lovely pull request on Github.